A Lesson Lived

My last message introduced to you a flight instructor who taught me how to fly in 1966. Sam was 110 years old at the time. Actually he was probably a bit older than I am right now, but from the perspective of an 18 year old, he was ancient. Sam would rank right up there with one of the most interesting characters I have ever met. It is strange that I should think of him so often these days. He was a man of few words who exuded a wisdom that we all envy. He could teach so much with just a gesture or a look. Like everyone else in the sixties, Sam was a smoker who could hand roll a cigarette with an expertise that was enviable even by a non-smoker in the present day. He was capable of the one handed perfect cigarette.

Early in my flight training career he directed me to climb to four thousand feet over a very large lake. We were seven or eight miles from shore over the white capped water when we reached the height he requested. At that point he announced, “I have control” and proceeded to explain to me that he was about to demonstrate an incipient spin and how to recover from it. In my naïveté I though to myself, “How bad can this be?”. He pulled back on the throttle and pulled the nose straight up in the air. I was beginning to suspect how bad this could be. As the airplane stalled in the air, it actually slid downward and backward in the air. The left wing then suddenly dipped and the nose fell toward the lake below. If you can imagine your most terrifying midway ride and then multiply it by five, you have an idea of the sensation of spinning downward nose first towards the lake…the rough white capped lake that now seemed so close. Since we seemed, in my mind at least, to be spinning forever, I looked back over my shoulder in desperation wondering if Sam had passed out or something. I know I certainly felt like doing so! What I witnessed will be seared into my mind as long as I remain on this earth. Sam was rolling a cigarette as we plummeted to earth, well… water covered earth. Indeed he even took the time to light the perfectly rolled smoke with his Zippo lighter prior to explaining how to pull out of an incipient spin and indeed demonstrating it rather successfully at who knows what altitude. I will never forget what a stall or an incipient spin is, nor will I forget how to get out of one, which I quickly learned to do just as the stall was over and the spin had hardly begun. I also learned that a stall was to be avoided at all costs. Like I said earlier, Sam was a man of few words who could teach so well by his actions or in this case his very delayed actions. Any good teacher will tell you that a lesson lived is a lesson learned.

The greatest teacher who ever lived also used many living lessons to reinforce His ministry. One of the best examples is found in The Book of John. The disciple named Thomas refused to believe the accounts of the other disciples who had seen the resurrected Jesus. He claimed that he would not believe He was alive and risen until he could see the marks left by the nails on the hands of Jesus and the wound in His side. (John 20: 26-29)

26 ¶ And after eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, "Peace to you!"
27 Then He said to Thomas, "Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing."
28 And Thomas answered and said to Him, "My Lord and my God!"
29 Jesus said to him, "Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Thomas is immediately transformed into a believer and indeed an apostle by actually seeing and feeling the wounds of the risen Jesus. All of the apostles, upon interacting with the resurrected Messiah, came out from behind locked doors and preached the gospel of Jesus Christ boldly and openly. Clearly a lesson lived is a lesson learned.

Having acknowledged that, I just love the last line of my selection today, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." Are you blessed today?

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